As you might know, Zemanta is taking part in a Seedcamp process. Which means some initial funding and three months of work in London. Yesterday Seedcamp semi-officially ended in an event called “investors day” where all 6 teams/companies presented what we have done in last months and how we plan to take over the world in the future (starting with our respective markets).

It was quite astonishing how far all of us got since the beginning of September. Presentations were naturally all polished up, but more importantly we knew much better what we are actually talking about. At this point I’d really like to thank Reshma, Saul, all the mentors, investors and rest of the Seedcamp crowd for providing us with this great opportunity to learn, develop and progress.

With new gained experience we are now far better equipped to explore what lies ahead of us.

Related articles by Zemanta:

• 52 hours left to apply for Seedcamp [localglobe.blogspot.com]
• More Events and Seedcamp on the Road [blog.seedcamp.com]

During last month I’ve given several interviews about the stuff we are doing. They are much more explanatory than our current web page is (we are working on that too), so someone might be interested:

• video: Jean Michel Billaut during Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin (about Zemanta and what we do)
• video: IntrudersTV during OpenCoffe Club session (about Zemanta and entrepreneurship)
• podcast by BBC Backstage’s Matthew Cashmore (recorded during MiniBar, along with other Seedcampers)

On Jean’s video you can actually see a demonstration of a working version of the plugin.

Today we held our our first public demo at the MiniBar meetup. Audiance was presented with sneak-peak preview of English version of our contextual engine. We defeated all the last-minute bugs and it worked flawlessly. A day before at the presentation in front of Tom Glocer, we learned that you should never put your demo on weird non-80 ports.

Now we are moving forward with contextual technologies (and removing buttons from the interface). If you want to be notified when we have more stuff to show to the public, sign up for our Newsletter.

Photo by Peter Čuhalev

Douglas Adams really liked the whooshing noise of the deadlines when they flew by. Similarly our own presentations are approaching with speed of light and accelerating. We’ll be presenting at Mini Bar on 19. October together with other Seedcamp finalists and a week later to Seedcamp investors.

However we plan to use a bit different deadline-combating-tactics than Adams did, so we are working day and night to deliver on time. And when you work on fun things, time flies like an arrow (which is an interesting syntactic disambiguation problem - disclamer: which we don’t plan to try solving).

You really start to notice how time is disappearing when you have 52 hour batch job that machine has to process (digesting wikipedia dump if you wonder) and then around hour 43, disk fails for one single request and you have to start from the beginning. Luckily this time around Blaž is providing some redundancy processing in Ljubljana if Murphy visits us again.

Zemified!

Related articles by Zemanta:

• Empowering entrepreneurs, not just picking winners [blog.seedcamp.com]
• From student to startup [blog.seedcamp.com]

Getting mobile internet in London is really hard. Last few days we went to all major operators and asked them a simple question: We need mobile broadband. Can you help us?

After telling them that we don’t have UK bank account yet they were baffled. We explained that we need mobile broadband for three months and are willing to pay (almost) any price under condition that we get it right away. Even telling them that we are willing to pay one year subscription fee in advance didn’t help. They did not want our money.

The funny thing is Vodafone actually has a plan where you have no monthly fee and pay just for the traffic. We wanted to pay for traffic in advance, no go. They still wanted 18 month contract, even though there is no monthly fee.

The story has a happy ending, though. A fellow Seedcamper helped us taking a contract on his name. We are sincerely grateful. And he’ll also help us to make sense with our personal money.That is when we actually get UK bank account.

Update: Zemified!

Related articles by Zemanta:

• O2 seeks 1 million customers with home broadband [media.guardian.co.uk]
• Interview: Jim Hyde, who runs T-Mobile in Britain [business.guardian.co.uk]

One of things that have changed after Seedcamp is reading email. Now we actually have to look at the body of tens of emails a day that have subjects such as “Congratulations!!”, “Congratulations you have won” and “We need to meet”. This sheds completely new light on the human task of recognizing spam.